Representing Word Problems with an Image

A response to the Consider This Activity
created by Alexandra Hudyma (@akhudyma)

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It’s no secret that most students despise doing applications, or “word problems”, as there isn’t much of an algorithm or step-by-step process that can be applied to solving them. They require a high ability to interpret information in English, translate that to math, use math to find what you’re looking for, and translate your answer back into English.

I try and introduce word problems in a light-hearted way. They have become notorious for creating scenarios where someone purchases an obscene amount of fruit. In fact, I’ve been including “math memes” alongside each concept in my recent courses, and I found countless memes where a man is buying a ridiculously large quantity of watermelons.

So, I could display this photo when introducing a unit on word problems. I searched “lots of watermelons” on multiple websites, and surprisingly Flickr was where this image was selected. All of the websites I chose (the ones that are in the description of this activity) were easy enough to use and produced okay results, with the exception of the MediaWiki Commons, which only resulted in files and no images.